As the blog's Mission Statement makes clear, the blog will NOT function as a forum to post any accusations against particular authors, articles, etc (such things will not be permitted). Instead, the blog is a place where individuals can submit posts arguing that particular works/authors have be under-cited/under-recognized in a given body of literature as a whole. In other words, the blog aims to merely serve as a forum to rectify cases of systematic omission--a forum for people to argue that specific works that (1) contributed substantially to some debate in philosophy, have (2) for some reason or another, not received due citation or credit in that literature as a whole.

I believe that this is a worthy endeavor worth attempting, and have begun the new blog as a tentative attempt to do it in a positive (rather than accusatory) way. Philosophers who have not received due credit for their contributions should receive such credit, and I hope the new blog can provide a positive forum for helping to accomplish that.

[cross-posted at Prosblogion] This is the first installment of a series of interviews I am conducting with academic philosophers about their religious practices. Curiously, there’s relatively little attention for religious practices, with most work in philosophy of religion strongly focusing on beliefs (this is changing thanks to excellent work by Terence Cuneo, Howard Wettstein, Sarah Coakley and others, but this work is still decidedly in the minority).

In this series of interviews, I ask philosophers who are religious practitioners—they go to church or temple, pray, utter blessings, engage in stoic meditation, read the Torah, serve in the capacity of priest—about their religious practices and the influence on their philosophical work. I have interviewed (and am in the course of interviewing) agnostics, theists and atheists, hopefuls and skeptics. The contributors are in various stages of their career, tenured and untenured. Interviews were conducted through e-mail and responses are not edited, except for some occasional shortenings (indicated by ellipses)

The first interview is with Marcus Arvan, who is an assistant professor at the University of Tampa. Arvan self-identifies as a hoping Agnostic and attends Catholic mass weekly.

02/28/2015

I came across a social media post today on an issue that I've heard people raise serious concerns about before, and which once again speaks to philosophers' problematic citation practices (for more, see here, here, here, and here). Although it's not my place to share who told the story or who the story involves, the general story is (in my experience) a disturbingly familiar one:

Philosopher A defends an argument X in year Y.

A much more famous philosopher B defends a similar argument several years later.

In other words, the first person who came up with the argument is not given credit for it in the literature, but instead the credit is given to a more famous philosopher who also came up with the argument later. In the present case, I might add that philosopher A was a junior woman in the profession (and published argument X in a very highly-ranked journal), whereas Philosopher B is a senior male in the profession--both of which seem to me quite relevant given recent discussions of citation data. In the present case, Philosopher A not receiving due credit for the idea cannot even be chalked up to A publishing the argument in an obscure journal (which, for the record, I think is a poor excuse to not give someone credit). No, Philosopher A published the argument in a top-ranked journal and yet has still been systematically deprived of credit for the argument.

Unfortunately, although this is only my impression, from stories that I have heard from a variety of different people this sort of thing--a person publishing an original argument or theory not getting due credit in the literature--does not appear uncommon at all. In fact, it appears to happen quite a lot. I've just heard too many stories of it happening, and indeed, have personally encountered something similar recently.

Although this isn't merely a problem in philosophy--the sciences also have a sordid history of some people being deprived of due credit (e.g. Charles Darwin getting all the credit for the theory of evolution when Alfred Russel Wallace published on it first, Rosalind Franklin getting cheated out of credit for discovering the DNA double-helix, etc)--it clearly does seem to be a problem in philosophy, and a problem that something should be done about. But what? What can we do? What should we do?

Although I don't agree with him on much, I found this post by Jason Brennan a refreshingly frank--and accurate--discussion on the pro's and con's of grad school, what it takes to succeed in grad school, the many different ways and points that a grad school experience can unexpectedly go off the rails, and what life in the academy is like post-grad school. A must-read, in my opinion, for anyone considering a PhD in philosophy.

02/25/2015

Kieran Healy and his student Nick Bloom have presented some striking results of citation-data across 2,100 articles published in Nous, Philosophical Review, Mind, and Journal of Philosophy between 1993 and 2013. A lot of the data on gender are particularly striking--namely:

Only 12.5% of articles published in those journals were by women.

On the average, articles by women are not cited less often than articles by men, but

The top 1% cited articles by men are cited far more often than the top 1% cited articles by women.

Healey then suggests that (3) is worrisome because it indicates that men are disproportionately treated as "agenda setters" in the discipline:

The key question is, who gets to be a focal point for discussion? Successful, highly-cited articles don’t simply accrue status rewards in the abstract (or just actual money rewards for their authors). They also become centers of gravity that define what a field is about...But the agenda for the discussion is set by a much smaller panel of people up on the stage—people who started out as audience members. Most of academic life has this structure, from departmental talks to conference panels and plenaries to journal exchanges. A key issue then becomes how work gets selected for attention up on the stage, who gets engaged with from the stage, so to speak, and how this process plays out as new audience members come in the door.

I think this is an important issue worth discussing, and think Healy is to be commended for painstaking collecting, analyzing, and presenting this data. But I also think Healy's data and analysis reveals a bunch of other broader issues that are worth discussing too. For example, Healy writes:

On the average hardly anyone is getting cited, be they man or woman. If you look at the top half of Figure 5, you can see that above 75 citations or so there aren’t any red dots. By definition very few people make it to the upper end of the distribution.

I've written before about how poor I think citations practices in philosophy compared to other fields (see here, here, and here), and want to suggest that it is how philosophers (idiosyncratically) think about the purpose of citations that is plausibly responsible for the gender disparities Healey discusses--and which must be corrected for if those disparities are to be corrected.

Healey implies that in order to correct for the gender gap in the "agenda setting" top-1% of cited articles, we need to think carefully about who is regarded as "agenda setting" (i.e. not just men!). This may be the right way to solve the problem--but I doubt it. The problem, I think, is in regarding the purpose of citations as "recognizing agenda-setting research." My wife works in a STEM field in which there appear to be no significant gender disparities. In her field, men and women alike are cited alike like crazy. Why? Answer: because people don't regard citations as an "honorific"--as recognition of "good, agenda-setting work." No, in her field, one is expected to cite all recent work on a given topic. Obviously, since one is expected to cite all work, opportunities for gender-discrimination are minimized. If one fails to cite a recent article--by man, woman, etc.--a journal reviewer will call you out on it, and tell you to cite it.

Whenever I have discussed citation-practices, however, people have chimed in and said that the purpose of citing work is to "cite good work." Ah, but that's the problem. Once that's how you conceive the purpose of citations, it open the flood-gates to implicit biases. If people have implicit biases that lead them to judge work by men more favorably than work by women, then the "cite good work" approach to citation practices will predictably result in the very disparities that Healey is suggesting are problematic.

Which presents the question: are implicit biases easier to change, or are citation practices? I'll leave it to you to think about and discuss, but I will say this: the literature on implicit bias seems to me to suggest that implicit bias is extremely difficult to combat--and so, I would suggest (yet again), the right answer is: we need to change how philosophers think about the purpose of citations in general, and change citation practices away from the "cite work you think is good and influences you" to "cite all recent work on the issue, regardless of whether you like it."

I came across a post on New APPS in which Jon Cogburn mentions that his highest placed publication, which finally appeared in Australasian, was rejected 7 times. I began to wonder just how common this is. As a young scholar, it could be helpful to know just what others experiences are. Do other philosophers eventually publish in highly ranked journals after a long series of rejections?

In the comments to that old blog post, someone asks the question I have in mind:

"Stories of persistence are good for the profession. Many thanks. I would be intrigued to see the back-history of papers, anonymously done. It could take the form of: My paper at journal A was previously rejected at journals B, C, D, E, F. and G, after minor/moderate/substantial revisions. I'll start: My paper at British Journal for the History of Philosophy was previously rejected first at the Journal of the History of Philosophy and then at The Review of Metaphysics after moderate revisions. This exercise might also be helpful in viewing how successful authors rank journals."

Unfortunately no one responded to this post. I thought the Cocoon would be a perfect place to have such a discussion, since so many of its readers are also probably struggling to make in into journals (of whatever kind), and wondering just how many rejections successful papers usually receive.

So I was wondering if you would be willing to start a thread on this topic on the Cocoon.

I think this is a great query, and am curious to hear what readers' experiences have been. Do you have a story of persistence you are willing to share? If so, I imagine many readers would be interested!

For my part, I have one story I'm sort of proud of, and in any case learned a lot from. My article, "First Steps Toward a Nonideal Theory of Justice", was rejected--in one variant or another (and there were many!)--by well over 15 journals over about 6 years before landing at Ethics & Global Politics. Although its final destination may not impress (E&GP is a new, relatively unknown journal), it's still one of the papers I'm most proud of. I previously had revise-and-resubmits on it from two highly ranked journals, but, I am sad to say, I totally mucked them up. In any case, although I almost gave up on it at one point, and although I worry sometimes it will be ignored in the literature due to not ending up in a name journal, I am all-things-considered glad for the entire process and the end-result. Truth be told, it became clear to me in retrospect the paper was never "ready" until E&GP. I struggled to get the argument right for years, and it was only thanks to some truly awesome comments from two reviewers at E&GP that (in my view) I finally got the argument right (or, as right as it can be). And that's what matters--or should matter?--in the end, right? At least, that's what I'm inclined to think. I'm actually glad the earlier versions hadn't been accepted by the better journals, as I think it's a far better paper now, regardless of where it ended up.

Anyway, that's my story. Do you have a story of your own you'd like to share?

02/24/2015

How often do all of you submit to a journal without presenting at a conference first? The reason I ask is because I've been having trouble finding suitable conferences on the phil listserv for political philosophy. I'm still in grad school so I could have my advisers look at my papers, but would that be sufficient?

After many years, I am sort of fed up with having to answer the question above, and this is also why I had not read the essay by Barua (bearing the title Is there 'Philosophy' in India? An Exercise in Meta-Philosophy and available here) until he recommended it to me. In fact, the article tells more about what it means to ask the question, than about the answer (which is a straightforward "yes").

First, the question bears on the distinction between faith and reason and theology and philosophy (and the consequent dismissal of Indian philosophy as a quest for liberation, mystical etc.):

[There is an] often-heard criticism that classical Indian thought cannot be characterised as an intellctually acceptable branch of 'academic philosophy' becayse it is entangled with 'religion' (p. 14).

And already on the first page, Barua speaks of the parallel condemnation of the medieval Scholasticism and of thinkers like Thomas Aquinas:

The Schoolmen are not 'philosophers' because they are Churchmen whose point of departure is a specific Christian world-view, and hence thier learned treatises are to be cognised, as David Hume famously put it, to the withering flames of logical analysis.

Thus,

Anglophone philosophy's rejection of its internal other, medieval Scholasticism, is paralleled by its suspicion of its external other, Indian darśana ---both are supposed to be fatally implicated in Metaphysics, Authority and Tradition (pp. 14--15).

This conclusion supports the more general point that "philosophy is not a natural kind" (p. 6) and that, thus,

Any definition is controversial and already embodies a philosophic attitude (Russell 1975:7, quoted at p. 7).

In this sense, the question at the title of this post opens an exercise in meta-philosophy ("What do we expect 'philosophy' to mean?"). As for the possiblity of detecting "philosophy" in India,

as it often happens with the translation of terms which are richly woven into one specific cultural universe into those of another cultural universe, we may argue that terms such as darśana and ānvīkṣikī are 'not the same, and yet not another' from philosophia (p. 27).

But this by no means means that one should refrain from using the word "philosophy" while speaking of Indian schools and discussions. On the one hand, as shown by Barua, the soteriological commitment of several Indian schools does not mean that they did not engage in philosophical arguments about the issues deriving from such a commitment (e.g., the nature of reality and of the self). On the other (at last, in the present writer opinion),

As for western philosophers themselves, in the wake of Kuhn and other thinkers who have developed various froms of social epistemology, they have become less shy of speaking of authoritative testimony (pp. 27--28).

As for the sociality of the scientific enterprise, this article focusing on the Western scenario by Dominik Wujastyk is also worth mentioning. Beside the above, Barua's essay also deals with several instances of debates both in India and in the West. Barua refers to J. Ganeri's point that we have to "rescu[e] a story suppressed by Orientalism --- the story of reason in a land too often defined as reason's Other" (Ganeri 2001: 4, quoted at p. 26). Nonetheless, whereas Ganeri and Matilal dealt with the accusation that Indian thought is just mysticism by showing its rigour, Barua recurs to Hadot and shows that also in the West philosophy does not need to be disinterested and pure theoresis. Section "C" is in fact a long discussion of Augustine's conception of time and of how his philosophical reflections are not "an exercise in idle speculation but are closely related to his exegetical struggles with the Biblical text" (p. 12).

A further, personal comment: Some time ago, a friend has been interviewed for a leader position in an institute for Asian thought. She said she would like the institute to have a "philosophical focus" and one of the people in the committee (who does not work on philosophy) rebutted that using the word "philosophy" could be suspected of a "colonialist attitude", since "philosophy" is a Western concept. I am sure this objection was well-meant, but I am suspicious of its consequences, namely the implicit statement that only Westerners are able to think philosophically. While thinking we are fair and diversity-aware, we are in fact delegitimizing centuries of philosophical elaborations by refusing to call them "philosophy" just because they happened to take place East of Suez.

02/23/2015

One of my worries about conferences is different, but this may be a good place to discuss it. Rather than conferences being cliquey (some of which undoubtedly are), my worry is that many conferences rely on the participation of junior people who may receive no job market benefits as a result. Here I am thinking of conferences strictly in terms of benefits that presenters may receive and not what benefits presenters may confer to others. I have multiple conference presentations, including three at the APA and several at specialty conferences. This has netted me virtually no job market success, in part, I suspect, because conference presentations have turned out to be valueless on a CV. (I also have multiple pubs, which have also not gotten me very far in the job hunt.) But if conference presentations have no intrinsic worth on a CV, then all of the value lies in the network possibilities and feedback from audiences, which is a crap shoot. Some conferences (especially specialty conferences, which are comprised of people working in the same area) do not present opportunities for networking, since the people who will be on hiring committees were not in attendance at the conference or are inaccessible, even if they are there. And audience feedback can be anything from helpful to worthless to harmful. Yet, many conferences rely on there being submissions from junior people. Add to this the considerable travel costs associated with going to conferences and it looks like focusing on conference activity is a bad gamble for those who need a job. So, on the one hand, presenting at a conference might be without practical value for junior presenters, while, on the other hand, these conferences rely heavily on junior people submitting and presenting. Conferences then become part of the adjunctification of the discipline--relying on those who are giving cheap labor without significant return on the labor. A simple solution would be to weight more heavily conference presentations when it comes to job searches--especially "prestigious" conferences, like the APA. Until this happens, junior people should think deeply about whether they want to perpetuate this phenomenon by submitting papers to conferences.

Because I think Scott's comment raises several issues worth discussing, I thought I would dedicate the present post to discussing it (I'd like to thank Scott for agreeing to have the comment featured and discussed).

My first question is whether readers share Scott's experiences about conferences--namely, that they not very useful for junior people, particularly in terms of the job-market. For my part, I've always (rightly or wrongly) felt like conferences are excellent opportunities for:

Practice formally presenting your work in front of an audience.

Practice talking informally about your work, and philosophy more generally.

Getting useful feedback on your work for the purpose of publishing.

Learning more about what kinds of things other people are working on.

Getting to know other people in the discipline (i.e. "networking" if you want to call it that, but friendships too).

Setting aside their intrinsic value, all of these things seem to me useful for early-career people, including the job market. (1)&(2)--practice formally and informally discussing your work--seem to me very useful for developing interview and job-talk skills. Similarly, (3)--conference-feedback--has always seemed to me very useful for revising work for publication. I've rarely--if ever--felt like conference feedback was useless or harmful. I tend to think one can almost always take something away from conference feedback, even the most vicious and obtuse/confused kind. After all, I think to myself, if one person at a conference viciously attacks or misunderstands my paper, it's likely that journal referees will respond similarly (in which case the vicious conference attack/misunderstanding can help me revise the paper to avoid a similar fate with reviewers!).

Next, I tend to think (4)--learning about what other people are working on--is not only, but can also be useful in terms of knowing what's going on in the discipline, which in turn may be relevant at on-campus interviews (since people on search committees may want to talk about their work, which may hook up with stuff you've encountered at conferences!). Finally, (5)--getting to know people--even if, as Scott notes, there are no search committee members at the conference--can still be fun for its own sake and also job-market-useful in other ways: you never know who you might strike up a conversation with at conference! Maybe you'll meet and have a good conversation with someone who'll write you a recommendation letter someday. Or, maybe you'll just meet someone who likes your paper, mentions it to a friend of theirs, who maybe will mention it to a friend of theirs, etc.--"getting your name out there", so to speak. Anyway, although I don't consider myself much of a networker, I've seen people get pretty far these ways.

All that being said, I think Scott's more general worry about conferences is worth talking about more. Because conferences are expensive to attend, not everyone has the same opportunities to attend them and enjoy whatever benefits they do confer. People in stable, well-paying positions can typically afford to attend a lot of conferences, whereas grad students and people in part-time, low-paying positions may not. This, in turn may contribute, as Scott puts it, to the "adjunctification" of the discipline. If conferences are useful but people in part-time/low-paying positions cannot attend many of them, then that may put them at significant professional disadvantage. Which raises the questions: should something be done about this? If so, what?

I would like to suggest that professional philosophy conferences should generally try to set aside some slots for "Skype" presentations, for those who cannot afford to travel. We have done precisely this at our two annual Philosophers' Cocoon Philosophy Conferences...and, in all honesty--with just a few glitches--they have worked like a charm! They gave junior people who could not afford to travel the opportunity to present their work, and logistically they worked very well: there were few problems, and on the whole the sessions weren't very different than in-person presentations. Skype participants and audience members could hear, and see, each other fine, and the Q&A sessions were great. [Note: as I write this, I have just heard that an acquaintance who presented at the APA via Skype encountered serious technical issues. I suspect such problems are more common at hotel-based conferences such as the APA].

One of the things that prospective graduate students have the most difficult time doing is knowing in advance what seeking a PhD will be like. In my day, almost everyone entered into grad school terribly naive. We all expected to not only finish, but finish in 5 years, and then secure a tenure-track job. Why did we think this? Well, because I'm an old man. Okay, I'm only 38, but I actually started grad school in Syracuse in 1999 (before transferring to Arizona in 2001). Back in those days, realistic information about grad school was super hard to come by. It wasn't floating around the internet. Ahem...the internet was still pretty new then (gosh, it's hard to say that!:).

So, the realities of seeking a PhD in philosophy came as a huge surprise to many of us. Many of the very bright people I knew never finished, and I struggled far more than I ever imagined. On the whole, grad school was not at all what I expected. It wasn't the linear path to success that I'd assumed it would be. It was unexpected potholes, personal and philosophical crises, fears I would never come up with dissertation, fears I would never finish, fears I would never get a job. You get the picture.

Although I think elements of Lin's "notes" paint too linear of a picture (viz. "this is all you have to do to get a PhD and get a job")--Lin also presents a lot of his advice "assuming you will finish in 5 years (an unrealistic expectation, given statistics showing a median completion time of 7-10 years!)--I think Lin has done potential graduate students a real service by showing just how professionalized academic philosophy has become. Thanks to Lin's notes--as well as to recent conversations I've had with graduate students--it is very clear what graduate school and the job market now involve. Allow me to explain.

When I started graduate school, here was the story. You took classes. You wrote term-papers. You took comprehensive examinations. You came up with a dissertation idea. You wrote a dissertation. And that was all. I'm really not kidding. Grad school was almost entirely just about philosophy. We weren't told to try to publish papers. In fact, we were actually told not to--that grad school is a time to learn how to do philosophy; that publishing is something one did after the dissertation--that is, after getting a job. Aside from just doing philosophy, there wasn't much in the way of professionalization. "Professionalization" was just doing philosophy.

Then, about 2/3 of the way through my graduate school experience, everything changed. I seem to recall it happening sometime around the 2007-8 financial crisis, if not a bit before--but it all happened pretty quickly. My grad program developed professionalization seminars. Grad students started publishing. Grad students had to start publishing to get jobs. And network. Etc. In other words, the reality that Lin's notes describe came about. Getting a PhD in philosophy all of a sudden became about a whole lot more than writing term-papers, writing dissertations, etc. It increasingly came to be a matter of strategizing one's career--a matter of doing the right things, at the right time, in the right order, from very early on in grad school. For better or for worse, it is the reality now. And I think Lin's "notes" do prospective students a great service by showing them this. Finally, perhaps Lin's notes can stimulate greater discussion on the entire trend of professionalization--on whether this is the direction we want to keep heading in as a profession (though, for what it is worth, I doubt there is much we can do about it).

I had a question that I'm not sure has been addressed [on the Cocoon]. One of the pieces of advice given in Lin's article you've referenced is, "Good academic reputation. Benchmark: there exist people whom you haven’t met before, but who have known your name and had rough ideas about your work." Something this brings to mind is developing networks among other scholars in your area of specialization or on the particular problems on which you work. I am a near-PhD (my dissertation has been approved and will be submitted in the next couple of weeks) and my advisor has suggested other scholars to contact since they work on similar topics. This is a wonderful idea, but I realize I have no clue of how to introduce myself in that context via email. What would you, or your readers, suggest as a proper way of initial introducing yourself in such a situation?

Great question! I was given similar advice after I received my first job, and I too was unsure of how to properly go about it--and, in fact, I'm sad to say, I put off actually doing it for another year or two. One good thing to do, if you have the resources, is to just start going to more specialist conferences in your area, as these are great places to meet people working in your area. Another thing you can do, however--and I've done it myself with varying levels of success--is to simply email people whose work you're interested in, tell them you admire their work (briefly demonstrating in your email that you do in fact know their work), and sort of feel out whether they're willing and interested to converse on the topic over email, swap working papers, read a draft of a paper of yours that you're hoping to publish, etc. Finally, I would really suggest developing a greater online presence. I've been a contributor at various blogs--Brains, Flickers of Freedom, Experimental Philosophy, and Public Reason--for a number of years (since just after graduate school), and they've provided excellent opportunities to get to know people.

What do you all think? Do you have any suggestions/experience in this area that you've found helpful? If so, I'm sure this reader, and other readers with similar questions, would be interested to hear of it!

02/19/2015

Hanti Lin's, "Notes on Doing a PhD and Getting a Job in Philosophy", has been going around on social media the past day or so, and is now receiving attention at Daily Nous. I appreciate Lin's desire to help and provide good advice--and I also appreciate Lin's being explicit that his advice should be taken with a grain of salt and weighed against the advice of others. That being said, I believe there are good grounds for skepticism about a lot of his advice. Allow me to explain.

I want to begin by saying that, on the face of it, Lin's advice is good advice for landing an R1 research job. Indeed, I think it is worth noting that Lin is currently Assistant Professor at UC-Davis. In terms of landing jobs like these, Lin's advice generally strikes me as sound. Consider for instance Lin's section entitled, "What do I need on the job market?", which reads:

Good papers published in good journals even before you finish your PhD, and consistent productivity after you get your PhD.

Good academic reputation. Benchmark: there exist people whom you haven’t met before, but who have known your name and had rough ideas about your work.

Good letters of recommendation from good philosophers.

No more. Everything else I am going to mention in this note is about steps toward getting the above three. And you want to think hard about this question: to get those three, are there alternative steps that will work better to you.

I don't think there is much doubt that these are the primary (if not only) things search committees are looking for at R1 jobs. Committees at R1 departments are looking for awesome researchers, and Lin's tips here speak to that. Similarly, consider Lin's advice for how to behave during on-campus interviews:

Be able to switch between two modes:

Defence mode: defend your ideas until you die. People want to know if you are a good researcher.

Friend mode: be open minded and willing to listen to other people’s opinions. People want to know if you can be a good friend and a good colleague, who might be around for the next 30 years if you get tenured.

Defence mode during job talk and Q&A.

Friend mode during lunch and dinner.

When meeting with faculty members in their offices: well... something between these two modes.

When meeting with the dean: explain how your work is related to other departments (and, possibly, the dean’s department).

Here too, this advice seems pretty reasonable...for R1 departments. R1 departments want to see how brilliant you are in discussing your research (viz. "defense mode"), and less so, what kind of colleague you will be ("friend mode"). Similarly, deans at R1 schools want to know how you'll contribute to the research standing of the university. Etc.

But R1 jobs are not the only jobs there are--nor are they even the vast majority of jobs. Although I haven't carefully broken down the distribution of jobs advertised on this year's job market, I know from having been on the market that precious few jobs this year were top-flight R1 jobs. The vast majority of jobs I applied to, for instance--and I applied to over 100--were at smaller, teaching-oriented schools. Which raises the question: are search committees at these schools looking for the things Lin lists?

The evidence here, I believe, is pretty clear: the answer is no. First, I have carefully compiled job market numbers the past severalyears, including the publication records of new hires--and surprise, surprise, here are the lessons I drew from the actual data:

Lesson#1: If you want an R1 job, you must either have at least one top-20 journal publication or have no publications at all but come from a Leiter-awesome department.

Lesson#2: Non-top-20 journal publications DO NOT harm you, either in the case of R1 jobs or teaching jobs.

Lesson#3: If you want a job at a teaching university, you do not need any top-20 journal publications.

Lesson#4: If you want a job at a teaching university, non-top-20 journal publications appear to help you.

Second, these lessons are also supported by my own first-hand and third-hand experience. This year alone, I know of more than a few candidates who scored a high number of interviews, fly-outs, and offers who--contrary to Lin's advice--had no publications in "good journals", but many publications in lower-ranked journals. I have also personally corresponded with committee members at smaller, teaching-centered institutions the past several years who have told me, explicitly, that they are scared off from candidates with R1-type publishing records (i.e. a bunch of publications in top-flight journals). Finally, of course, Lin's advice doesn't so much as mention teaching--and I can tell you for certain that departments and deans at teaching institutions are looking for great teachers and people that will fit into the college's vision of itself as a student-centered institution.

Similarly, consider Lin's advice to go into "defense" mode during job talks. While this may be right for a high-powered talk at an R1 school, I've once again heard from more than a few search committee members at smaller schools that they are primarily looking at seeing how collegially you handle yourself during the talk--i.e. whether you get defensive or combative during the talk. Being defensive/combative may work in R1 departments (where this sort of thing is expected), but at teaching institutions? There are plenty of reasons to think not. Remember, teaching institutions want to know what kind of teacher you will be, whether students will like you, whether you fit the college's vision, etc.

I also have concerns about Lin's advice on conferences. Lin writes:

The main job-hunting-related purposes of presenting a paper in a conference are:

to impress people,

to earn your reputation,

to find people to write recommendation letters for you.

Here is one problem I have. Trying to impress people can be self-defeating. Those of us who have been around long enough have seen--and, in some cases, exemplified--this error: the person who is plainly out to impress people comes off as insecure, aggressive, etc. In my experience, the best way to "impress people" is to actually not have these as your explicit aims. Instead, you'll tend to impress people, earn a good reputation, etc., by actually just trying to be a constructive member of the conference--providing helpful feedback, accepting critiques of your work as something to learn from, etc. Further, or so I've found, there's another thing that Lin leaves out--using feedback at conferences to improve your work--that is absolutely crucial for job-market success. Several of my early publications, for instance, might not have ever happened if I hadn't accepted and learned from feedback I received at conferences. So, I would say, no: the aims Lin lists shouldn't be your main aims at conferences. They are good ends--but the means for achieving them are these: work on being a good paper presenter, discussant, during the conference. And yes, be social. If you do all those things for their own sake, chances are you'll come off far better--vis-a-vis Lin's own stated ends--than the person who's clearly out trying to impress people.

Anyway, I could go on--but I suppose you get the picture by now. I may not be right about all this, but I thought it might be worthwhile expressing some areas of disagreement with Lin's advice, and the evidence I think there is for very different conclusions.

I want to suggest that the APA, and graduate departments, could do--and should do--a whole lot more when it comes to (4).

There is currently a discussion going on over at The Smoker on whether it's worthwhile to pursue a graduate degree in philosophy. An anonymous undergraduate wrote:

This is off-topic but here goes-- I'm a senior undergraduate philosophy major at what is apparently, according to the philosophical gourmet report, one of the top 15 philosophy programs in the English-speaking world. I am extremely passionate about philosophy and would be perfectly happy spending the rest of my days reading, writing, and teaching philosophy. I have a good GPA, transcript, GRE scores, etc., and could presumably get into a good grad program if I applied. That being said, I'm well aware of how tough the job market is for young academics, particularly for philosophers (especially after recently stumbling upon and reading through this insightful blog). Despite my passion for philosophy, I'm not sure if I'm willing to risk the stress and dissatisfaction of un/partial employment. It seems safe to assume that the people engaging with this blog are also extremely passionate about philosophy. Any thoughts or advice for a young, potentially-aspiring philosopher?

The response to this query was overwhelmingly negative--and in my experience this is not uncommon. I've encountered more professional philosophers who say they tell their undergraduates to avoid graduate school in philosophy like the plague than I can count. And, why I don't entirely agree with that advice, I'm sympathetic. My own career in philosophy has been a bumpy road indeed, one that almost came to a bitter end more than a few times.

All of this raises the question, however, of whether we could do better as a profession. It's a real shame, I think, that so many of us feel the need to deter bright, interested, and passionate people from pursuing philosophy on the grounds that it is most likely career suicide. Now, of course, there is unfortunately little that we can apparently do to "fix" the academic job market. Although I think we could probably do more than we do to make philosophy relevant and marketable within the academy, this is tough to accomplish (anyone who has tried to market philosophy better in a university probably knows what I'm talking about!). But, are there other things we could do? I think there are.

My wife is a PhD student in industrial-organizational psychology. One of things that in all honesty makes me a bit jealous of her career choice is that in her field, PhD students can go into two different directions: academia or applied-work. Programs in her field--and indeed the field as a whole--prioritize their students making connections and working outside of academia while completing their research. Now, of course, this is easier to do in a field with obvious applications in industry. But, I want to suggest, (A) there are significant areas of philosophy (e.g. moral and political philosophy, philosophy of science, logic, etc.) that have applied features that programs and our field as a whole could develop to our common benefit (side-work/internships at political think-tanks, etc.), and (B) regardless of that, our professional organization, the APA, could do a whole lot more in terms of empowering career development opportunities outside of the academy. Such as, you ask?

Consider, for instance, Helen De Cruz's recent three-partseries at NewAPPS interviewing philosophers working outside of academia. Given recent estimates that 70% of all jobs are obtained through networking, one thing that the APA could do is set up a career-networking system for people with MA's and PhD's in philosophy! If I had left academia and found employment in some other industry, for instance, I sure as heck would do everything I could to lend a hand to a fellow philosopher in need of work befitting their skills and education. And I suspect many others in a similar position would do the same. As such, given the fascinatingly diverse set of careers Helen's sample reported being in, if the APA put some real into a networking service of some sort, it might dramatically improve the opportunity and ability for academic philosophers to move into a variety of industries. Not only that, by forging connections among previously-academic philosophers, it might help produce new applied, philosophically relevant industries (e.g. philosophical think-tanks, etc.--one can only imagine what kinds of innovative business or non-profit ideas that groups of philosophers might have when brought together outside of the academy!).

Anyway, these are just some ideas--but, or so it seems to me, they are the kinds of ideas our discipline, graduate programs, and the APA should think more about. What do you think?